Uzbekistan

Language and Literature

As with ethnic patterns and boundaries of post-Soviet Uzbekistan, the
dominant native language, Uzbek, is in many ways a creation of the Soviet
state. Indeed, until the beginning of the Soviet period, the languages
spoken among the native population presented a colorful and diverse
mosaic. Under Soviet rule, officially at least, this mosaic was replaced
by Uzbek, which almost overnight became the official language of the
Turkic population of the republic. But Russian, which at the same time was
declared the "international language" of Uzbekistan, was favored
above even Uzbek in official usage. Many Russian words made their way into
Uzbek because Russian was the language of higher education, government,
and economic activity throughout the Soviet era. In the 1980s, Uzbeks
began a strong effort to eliminate the recent Russian borrowings from the
language. The Latin alphabet was introduced to begin a gradual process of
replacing the Cyrillic alphabet. But in the mid-1990s Russian still was
widely used in official and economic circles.